We’ll be doing some in-depth election recaps today and tomorrow, but first — a quick note on the failure of race-baiting in this election.
Via Adam Serwer at the Washington Post, When Us versus Them isn’t enough: Race-baiting flops as campaign tactic“
Among the silver linings for Democrats — and society, really — in the massive victories won by Republicans yesterday is that there is a very clear price to pay for exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment for political purposes. As Elise Foley notes, Colorado gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, and most infamously Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle went down in defeat after running campaigns that promised to crack down on immigration. […]
Other candidates with hardline views on immigration won their races yesterday — including David Vitter, who was running in a state with a small Latino population and ran some very ugly racialized ads. But these three contests show that exploiting anti-immigrant sentiment is hardly a silver bullet, and there’s a price to be paid for crossing the line.
